shepherd

by Robert L. Penick

At two a.m. you are “deep in the arms of Morpheus,” as your English teacher would say, when your mother shakes you from sleep. Dad is passed out in the yard again, couldn’t stagger in from where his buddies dropped him at the curb. You pull on the clothes you’d shucked earlier, hear the sleet lightly tapping the window, and add a sweatshirt from your laundry basket. Tie the shoes tight, he might be uncooperative again. 

Stepping onto the front porch, you see the dark lump that is your sire, huddled against the trunk of the dogwood. Walking up behind him you say, “Upsie-daisy!” and pull him up by the armpits. He gets his feet under him and the two of you do the frog-march to the steps. Here his cognitive functioning fails him and you hoist him up, step by step. Mother uncrosses her arms long enough to hold the door open. Dad gives up the ghost and you pull him backward, across the carpet, his shoes popping off his feet like dud firecrackers. Mother doesn’t want him stinking up their bed with bourbon, so you have to U-turn, then lay him out on the sofa like a cadaver. 

     “One night, we’ll let him freeze,” you mother decides. 

But you know you won’t. You will pick him up, bail him out of jail, mop his vomit from the bathroom floor for as long as it takes to shepherd him through this world. What pains you now will in thirty years become stories you tell to amuse your friends. Some will laugh, most will be mortified, but none will guess the loneliness of a child who watches over their parent like a parent. It will set you apart, make you immune to both fear and joy. 

Photo of Robert L. Penick

BIO: The poetry and prose of Robert L. Penick have appeared in well over 200 different literary journals, including The Hudson Review, North American Review, Plainsongs, and Oxford Magazine. The Art of Mercy: New and Selected Poems is now available from Hohm Press, and more of his work can be found at theartofmercy.net.